Angel di Maria, James Rodriguez, Diego Costa and Manchester City’s Eliaquim Mangala are among his clients, moving clubs in the past two months alone in permanent transfers worth £208.5million.

And that does not take into account the potential £51.3m final transfer involved in Colombian striker Radamel Falcao’s move from Monaco to Manchester United.

No wonder, the charming 48-year-old Portuguese ‘super agent’ Jorge Mendes, friend and adviser to footballing stars from Cristiano Ronaldo to Jose Mourinho, has been hailed for ‘winning’ the transfer window. And not just one.

VIDEO Scroll down to see Falcao and Rodriguez practice one-twos in Colombia training

Super-agent: Jorge Mendes, pictured with Radamel Falcao, boasts some of the world's best players as clients

Top clients: Following the transfers of Angel di Maria and Falcao, Mendes earned £20m from Man United

Discussions: Mendes chats with Monaco's sporting director Vadim Vasilyev at a Ligue 1 game this season

The Mail on Sunday have calculated Mendes has negotiated transfers totalling £1,068,370,548. So far.

With a typical ‘take’ of 10 per cent commission per deal, he will have cleared some £20m-plus this summer, and £100m-plus in commissions alone in his career. But his earnings do not stop there. Via his company GestiFute he also owns stakes in many players.

Mendes, married with five children, carries four mobile phones, is fluent in English, Spanish, French and Italian, and also acts as a consultant to other agencies who own and trade in players.

Total of Mendes' transfer negotations

Big deal: Mendes has negotiated many transfers

As such he represents what many fans see as the good, the bad and the ugly of modern football. He is, simultaneously, a key figure in a dynamic marketplace where you can rise on hard work and talent; a major player in a parasitic industry where hangers-on prosper; and a key figure in the often murky waters of vested interests where just a few people control many of the players and, arguably, the clubs.

That is not to traduce Mendes. Those who know him say he is engaging and provides good pastoral care. ‘He’s with players for the long haul, not the quick buck,’ says one associate.

Ronaldo says Mendes is a ‘fair and honest man’ who he trusts ‘completely’. Mourinho said of him in 2010: ‘When I was told there was to be an award for the best agent in the world, I was immediately convinced that the award had to be Jorge Mendes.’ The Chelsea boss also says Mendes encourages players to ‘respect their commitments’ to clubs. Sir Alex Ferguson says Mendes is ‘the best agent I dealt with, without a doubt’.

Also not in any doubt is Mendes’s increasing influence. GestiFute’s client list contains 58 names, two of them managers, Mourinho and Valencia’s Nuno Espirito Santo, the former goalkeeper known as Nuno.

On target: Chelsea striker Diego Costa, another Mendes client, has already scored four Premier League goals

The best: Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho was convinced Mendes should be named the best agent in the world

JAMES RODRIGUEZ

Club: Real Madrid

Age: 23

Nationality: Colombian

Position: Midfielder

Total move value: £101.50m

Last move: £63m to Madrid in 2014

Real Madrid’s Pepe and Fabio Coentrao are also on the list, as are United’s David de Gea and Anderson, and Monaco’s Ricardo Carvalho and Joao Moutinho.

Eighteen players are aged 23 or under, most of them in Portugal and Spain. Spotting potential and following it through is a hallmark of Mendes’s business.

He grew up in Lisbon, the son of a gas plant worker for Portugal’s biggest petrol company, Petrogal. By 20 he was playing semi-professional football as a left winger. He ran a video store, then opened a bar and club in coastal town Caminha. There he met Nuno, then 22, and helped him move to Deportivo La Coruna.

Eighteen years later, Nuno has been handed three young Mendes clients on loan this summer in a loan intake that also includes (non-Mendes clients) Alvaro Negredo and Bruno Zuculini, both from Manchster City.

By helping the young Nuno, Mendes was on his way, a fledgling agent at 30. He next helped midfielder Costinha get his break, from lowly Nacional to Monaco, then took winger Capucho from little Vitoria Guimaraes to Porto. His contacts grew, as did his rivalry with the then dominant Portuguese agent Jose Veiga. The pair had a scuffle over Luis Figo in Lisbon airport in 2002.

On the move: Defender Eliaquim Mangala joined Premier League champions Manchester City this summer

CRISTIANO RONALDO

Club: Real Madrid

Age: 29

Nationality: Portuguese

Position: Forward

Total move value: £92.24m

Last move: £80m to Real Madrid in 2009

Mendes didn’t land that client from Veiga but he did bag Hugo Viana, Ricardo Quaresma and Ronaldo. Crucially, he charmed a client from another agent, Jose Baidek; the client was Mourinho and the truly big time beckoned.

By Euro 2008, Mendes was representing every major Portuguese footballer. He was agent to 16 of the 23-man squad, and to Portugal’s manager Luiz Felipe Scolari, who he then took to Chelsea.

In such a high-stakes environment it is inevitable Mendes has upset people. He was accused of poaching Nani (in 2007) and Bebe (in 2011) from their respective former agents Ana Almeida and Goncalo Reis, just before those players made moves to United. They said he pinched their players; he said they wanted his help to make progress.

Reis said of his muscling in on the Bebe deal: ‘When Mendes arrived I was out of the transaction. It’s a sad thing that the one who discovers a player is not able to stay with him when big clubs are interested.’

Star names: Real Madrid's deadly duo of James Rodriguez and Cristiano Ronaldo are also Mendes clients

ANGEL DI MARIA

Club: Manchester United

Age: 26

Nationality: Argentinian

Position: Midfielder

Total move value: £89.08m

Last move: £59.7m to Man United in 2014

The Bebe transfer also highlights another aspect of Mendes’s business — owning players. His firm GestiFute earned about £2.87m from the £7.4m United paid for Bebe for their share of his ‘economic rights’.

Another of Mendes’s recent client moves took Spanish striker Adrian Lopez from Atletico Madrid to Porto, with Porto paying £8.7m for 60 per cent of the player and the other shareholding an unspecified third party.

Third-party ownership (TPO) is a regulatory minefield. In England it is prohibited by FA rules and opposed by the Premier League, whose spokesman said: ‘It threatens the integrity of competitions, reduces the flow of transfer revenue contained within the game, and has the potential to exert external influences on players’ transfer decisions.’

ELIAQUIM MANGALA

A report last year by auditors KPMG said there were about 1,100 TPO footballers at work around Europe, in total worth about £1bn.

Sources say four — among them Mangala — and perhaps more of the 100-plus players coming to the Premier League this summer were third-party owned — before the English clubs took 100 per cent ownership. Liverpool’s Lazar Markovic and United’s Marcos Rojo were among them.

Chelsea’s parent company, via a subsidiary firm, is believed to own a group of TPO players, but none in England, so no rules are broken. Mendes has been linked to that fund as consultant.

Mendes didn’t own Mangala, he is ‘just’ the player’s agent and worked with several parties as City paid about £40m for the player. The £40m was split between Porto, an ‘ownership fund’ called Doyen and another called Robi Plus, with agency fees on top.

No wonder Mendes, pictured so often with his clients recently, is always smiling.

All smiles: Mendes poses with Falcao and the Colombian striker's lawyers Paulo Rendeiro and Varlos Osorio